too dumb to read

checks out

Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.

I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.

then you’re just a bot.

I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.

Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.

I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.

You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.

And I say just launch the waste into space

This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.

Here, I have a couple examples to kind of, illustrate why, despite the common sentiment, antinatalism, and malthusianism, inherently, like, just straight up, don’t make any sense. This is all based on back of the napkin math that I did a while ago, and I don’t want to redo the numbers, so take it with a grain of salt maybe, but, yeah.

Okay, so, not really taking into account consumption or supply chain, which are major factors, you could fit the entire population of earth in one city the size of about one and a quarter rhode islands, if you had the population density of kowloon. Now, kowloon has retroactively been shat on as having a low quality standard of living, which is partially true, there were leaks everywhere, it was run by the mob, yadda yadda, but there’s nothing inherently problematic with that level of density, there. You could easily expand that to, say, two rhode islands, or three, right, and that would cover an insanely small portion of the earth’s surface while also being more than enough for everyone to live.

On the other hand, if you divided up the earth based on only habitable zones and arable land, you’d get about 2.5 acres per person, which I think also accounts for the elderly and children. To me, that sounds like probably 2.5x more than I would ever need in a lifetime, especially once we kind of tally up all the savings that we can get at scale, at mass production, and then maybe take costs for transportation.

We also, never, never ever take into account the amount of land management which was being done by the various natives of all their lands before colonialism kind of came in and fucked everything up. We have this conception of nature as being some kind of like, inherent good entity that humans can only ever destroy with their presence. A kind of untouched garden of eden that we should basically never touch. As being like, inherently sacred, or having some inherent value, even, to the point where we anthropomorphize it. “Mother nature”. We have this view of humans as also being completely separate from nature, as being an aberration, rather than being a part of it. I think these are both mistakes. We have to view humans as being a part of nature, and we have to start viewing nature as existing everywhere, rather than just being something that you minorly interface with when you go for a hike. Our built environment is part of nature, our decision to plant exclusively male trees that will give off a shit ton of pollen which covers all the windows and makes everything super shitty all spring so we don’t have fruit, that’s a part of nature. So are the raccoons and possums and stray cats and dogs and pigeons and weeds and other things which we see as being invasive but also simultaneously as having no real habitat anymore.

The real solution, I think, is only going to come about when humans collectively start to conceptualize and take accountability for what they go around and do, rather than just sort of, pawning off all responsibility for everything, and cooking up some apocalyptic reality where it’d just be better off if we didn’t exist at all. The genie is out of the bottle. Even to conceptualize of us as being “the problem”, as though there is a singular kind of problem, is a kind of anthropocentrism, and a kind of anthropomorphizing of nature.

I also assume I don’t need to really discuss how like, the idea that we’re currently doing everything in the most efficient way, is a little bit overconfident, and takes everything at a kind of, unchanging face value. As though we exist in the long arc of history with a kind of inevitability, rather than a random happenstance.

Sony also made their bottom button the default “confirm/execute” button and the side right button the “cancel/backout” button. It just feels more intuitive to me.

Here to note that this wasn’t the way it was meant to be, on their controller, hence the common confusion you tend to get with a lot of games. I think it comes about as a result of them maybe trying to tread more of a line between the two, as, though we forget, there were more in the race than just nintendo, sega, and later, sony, back in the day, and nobody had really “settled” the layout. Sega, obviously, went for a layout that is basically opposite to nintendo. I don’t know if it’s purely a region locked thing, or if it’s a game-by-game sort of thing (which seems like a stupid move but whatever), but the button layout in america, for playstation, has tended to conform more to nintendo’s layout, than to sega’s. I dunno why, maybe it has to do something with the popularity of certain consoles to certain regions, or something along those lines.

In any case, O is originally meant to be confirm, the X is meant to be cancel, which I think makes slightly more intuitive sense, pictorially. The O is the positive, the X is the negative. Obviously, over time, this sort of became swapped based on region, and actually, the PS5 is the one in which it’s actually become universal that the O is the cancel button and X is the confirm button, for the japanese. Which is probably fucking infuriating, for them, I’d imagine.

I think I find myself wanting a little bit of a tactile dot or something on the button, so as to more easily intuit which one to press. You could even retain the switch’s ability to flip around the controllers, if you just put all the tactile dots on the outer radius of all the buttons. Like, put a little bump on the top of the top button, put a little bump on the bottom of the bottom button, etc. The only thing I can’t really figure out is how you might refer to that in a game, or refer to that visually in a way that makes sense, other than maybe just building that association over time. But yeah, having them be distinguishable tactily is, I think, a good idea.

Sega had the dreamcast with an “A on the bottom”, basic xbox style layout about 3 years before the xbox came out, as an extension of their genesis six button layout. With how friendly sega has been with microsoft historically, and especially the similarities between the classic “duke” controller and the dreamcast controller, the increasing focus on online play, I think maybe there’s a through-line from the classic sega button layout and the modern xbox button layout.

I mean it kind of, instinctually makes some level of sense to me. With nintendo’s stuff, the A button is on the right, and the B button is on the left, so you’re reading it right to left, instead of left to right. Hence, the accompanying swap in X and Y.

Playstation still basically conforms to a on the right, since O is generally used as a “confirm” button, and X is generally used as a back out button. So, they fill the same role as the conventional layout, they just abstract it in a kind of more fun way.

So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said

I mean I just don’t think it’s so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.

What’s the pod?

i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.

It’s more stupid than that. The idea is that 140 characters is a lower barrier of entry for a reader, compared to reading a series of paragraphs that might be able to at least talk about something, or attempt to summarize an issue. It’s why accounts like wint can pop off, and become so prolific.

I second most of these other recommendations, but since I haven’t seen them said yet, The Magnetic Fields. Somehow manages to be funny while also being very geniune and touching, which I think is kind of what I look for in a band.

this guy clearly has arms

Yeah, I can’t change your mind on any of that then, it’s already made up. Just don’t complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don’t really tend to be very religious either, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not willing to pretend that I’m above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it’s specter.

I’m also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don’t think that’s a role that you could fill with a “secular alternative” to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it’s meaningless in reality, there’s a security there.

The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there’s not just one Bible. There’s different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it’s fundamental literal form. There’s different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I’m not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won’t do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone’s manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that’s basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I’m not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.

I was gonna write a longass comment in response to this but I’m kinda burnt on that because it’s 11:54 and nobody ever tends to read them, so I’m just gonna link one I previously left that’s pretty much on the same topic. Tl;dr, uhhh, I dunno. Just read the post, I’m just gonna end up saying the same shit at the same length if I try to summarize it.

depends on the reading, I think, could also refer to gay dudes.